Scandal’s Winter Finale Was More Than an “Abortion Episode”

For the first time on a network television series, Scandal showed a character undergoing an abortion in last night’s winter finale (there have been abortion story lines, but never a depiction of the medical procedure). Perhaps equally surprising, that character was not a teenager—as abortion is often depicted (on the rare times when it’s depicted at all) on TV. Spoiler: It was Scandal’s crusading protagonist, Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington), a brilliant political fixer who happens to be dating the leader of the free world, lying under the fluorescent lights with her legs in stirrups.

It’s already being called Scandal’s scandalous “abortion episode.” In a statement, the Media Research Center called it “disturbing” and said that the episode put “Hollywood’s moral depravity on full display.” But just as Planned Parenthood is not “just” an abortion provider—nor should it be demonized as such, as abortion is a federal, legal right for all women in the U.S.—last night’s Scandal was not just an “abortion episode.” In fact, Pope’s on-screen abortion occupied approximately 30 seconds of the 43-minute show. But reducing it to the “abortion episode” is a convenient dismissal of what was, more accurately, Scandal’s Planned Parenthood episode, a ripped-from-the-headlines portrayal of real-life efforts to defund Planned Parenthood in Congress.

A prominent, powerful arc on last night’s Planned Parenthood episode showed Republican senator and former First Lady Mellie Grant (Bellamy Young) filibustering a spending bill that would have made Planned Parenthood funding discretionary. “You say we’re not defunding Planned Parenthood and, technically, you’re right,” Grant told the Senate in the episode. “But by making that money discretionary, you give the people in this room the power to say, ‘You know what? We’re a little over budget this year. We won’t give that little ladies’ organization the full amount they’re asking for.’” Senator Grant, whose impassioned support of Planned Parenthood is uncharacteristic for a Republican politician, cited the oft-repeated statistic that abortion comprises 3 percent of Planned Parenthood’s services, in addition to services including contraceptive counseling, cancer screenings, and STI tests. “Twenty million women in the U.S. depend on government services for contraceptive care because they’re under age 20 or living under the poverty line, or both,” Grant said. Another spoiler: The filibuster worked.

It was a remarkably meta moment: a fictional politician tackling the real-life assault on abortion rights and women’s health at the very moment when it remains timely and pressing. Not only did the episode begin the process of destigmatizing abortion on television, but as Planned Parenthood said in a statement after the episode, “The millions of people who tune in to Scandal every Thursday night learned that our rights to reproductive healthcare are under attack.”